6  County Housing Market Assessment

The following provides a county-level analysis of major trends impacting housing within Central Virginia Planning District region. All data has been disaggregated to show the differences between localities.

6.1 Takeaways

  • Domestic migration is driving population growth in the counties — especially in Bedford.
  • Amherst’s population is expected to continue its decline for the next several decades.
  • Older homeowners are driving much of the growth, while renters are mainly coming to Campbell more and more.
  • Income disparities vary by county and racial and ethnic identity, but renter incomes lag behind homeowners regardless.
  • Diverse housing is lacking in the counties, especially among the homeowner housing stock.
  • Development activity in Amherst and Appomattox has been limited, while Bedford has seen declines in recent years and Campbell has seen increases.
  • Homeownership rates have been declining in recent years, except for in Bedford.
  • Rents have been relatively flat despite the demand.
  • Assisted housing is limited in the counties and cost burden for renters has remained relatively unchanged in the last decade.

6.5 Housing stock

The counties contribute to 72 percent of the region’s total housing stock. The majority of that share consists of single-family homes occupied by homeowners. Among the owner-occupied housing stock in the counties, there is little diversity as the only other type of housing with noticeable amounts is the “Other” category, which includes manufactured homes.

Renter housing stock in the counties is diverse, but still largely made up of single-family homes and manufactured homes. Two to four unit homes, like duplexes and quads, can look like single-family housing and can often be more affordable, but the counties only contribute one percent of this type of housing to the region’s total stock.

Bedford and Campbell counties are the two jurisdictions with the largest share of actual multifamily rental units, while Appomattox County has the lowest. Amherst County has the highest share of two to four unit apartment buildings, which make up just over 25 percent of the county’s total rental stock.

Figure 6.14: Housing stock by structure type and tenure

Manufactured home communities are prevalent among the four counties. Campbell alone has 41 manufactured home communities, most of which are communities of less than 50 homes. Bedford follows at 30 communities, 22 of which are small communities.

Although many of these communities make up a bulk of rural communities’ affordable housing stock, they are often plagued with housing quality issues. This is due to the prevalence of pre-HUD Code mobile homes located in parks.

Figure 6.15: Manufactured home communities by size

Local residential building permits show that the four counties have experienced the Great Recession and subsequent recovery differently. Bedford was on the rise pre-Recession but has struggled to recover to those previous levels, especially throughout the pandemic. But development in Bedford in recent years has focused on multifamily development (5 or more units), where it is undoubtedly centralized in the Town of Bedford.

Campbell was also seeing major growth ahead of the Great Recession but has seen starts and stops throughout the last decade. On the other hand, Amherst and Appomattox have seen little change in their building permit trends over the last two decades.

Regardless of these changes, there is a severe lack of diverse housing being built in the counties. Homes like duplexes are virtually non-existent in the development pipeline.

Figure 6.16: New residential building permits by type

6.6 Homeownership market

Homeownership rates vary across the four localities. Bedford has the highest homeownership rate at 84 percent, while Campbell has the lowest at 73 percent. Appomattox and Campbell were initially seeing rising homeownership rates throughout the first half of the decade, but those gains began to turn to losses in the second half. For Amherst, decreasing homeownership is a recent trend from 2020 to 2021 and it is uncertain whether this will continue.

Bedford’s homeownership rate was affected by the reversion of the city to town status, but in recent years, homeownership has been rising dramatically.

Figure 6.17: Homeownership rate

Note

TO ADD LATER: sales prices, closings, and days on market by locality – pending new data from LAR

6.7 Rental market

From 2016 to 2020, rental housing costs in the counties have remained relatively flat (relative to inflation). Since then, rents increased significantly in Bedford and Campbell counties. This growth coincided with rising inflation, so increases have not been significant in constant dollars. However, that adjustment does not account for the much more limited increases in renter incomes in recent years.

Note

The CoStar data used for this section does not have complete coverage of smaller scale rental properties, such as single-family homes and duplexes. Average rents are primarily sourced from larger, professionally managed apartment communities.

As a result, the sample sizes for Amherst and Appomattox counties—whose rental stock is more significantly comprised of small scale units—are small. Data for these localities should be viewed with caution.

TO ADD LATER: Single-family rent estimates from ACS by county

Figure 6.18: Average market asking rent by quarter

Note

TO ADD LATER: Rental vacancy rates by locality

Rental housing supported by federal subsidy in the counties is most likely to be found in Bedford, no doubt a result of the former City of Bedford’s inclusion in the data. Most of the subsidized housing in the counties is made up of project-based Section 8 rental housing (306 units, most of which resides in Bedford). The second most common subsidized housing is the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) (282 units), then followed by the Rental Housing Section 515 Program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) (266 units).

Note

For more information about these federal housing programs, please visit the National Housing Preservation Database’s Program Descriptions page.

Campbell is not represented among federal housing programs, but it is important to note that these estimates on affordable housing do not include tenant-based assistance like Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs) or state-funded programs.

Figure 6.19: Federally-assisted rental homes

Housing Choice Vouchers allow low-income individuals and families to find housing in the private market. HCVs serve as rental assistance to help households pay for housing that may exceed the value of the voucher. HCVs can also be project-based vouchers, meaning that a housing authority can re-allocate funding to tie a tenant-based voucher to a specific housing development.

In the counties, there are 248 HCVs being used by low-income households. Forty-two percent of those vouchers are being utilized in Campbell County.

Figure 6.20: Households with Housing Choice Vouchers

6.8 Affordability

Locally, trends in cost burden follow regional patterns of decreasing cost burden as a whole. But while cost burden for homeowners have been decreasing in each of the counties, renter cost burden has remained relatively unchanged over the last decade.

Figure 6.21: Cost-burdened households by tenure

Cost burden by race and ethnicity shows that white households across all four counties are less likely to be cost-burdened. This has been consistent since 2012.

Caution

Need to address margins of error on the estimates for Asian, another race, and Hispanic households. It may be best to exclude them from this.

Figure 6.22: Cost burden by race and ethnicity

In Amherst and Bedford, non-elderly, non-family households (i.e. individuals living alone or with unrelated persons) are more likely to be cost-burdened than any other household type, 44 and 30 percent cost-burdened, respectively. Meanwhile, in Appomattox and Campbell, 29 percent of elderly, non-family households (i.e. seniors living alone or with unrelated persons) were cost-burdened in 2019. These two household types face the most difficult challenges in affordability, most likely due to the challenges of affording housing alone. But interestingly, just over one in four (26 percent) large families in Appomattox are cost-burdened, a divergence from trends in the other three counties.

Figure 6.23: Cost burden by household type

The chart below shows whether renter households are currently living in affordable or unaffordable apartments, broken down by Area Median Income by to 80 percent AMI. For example, among all renters at or below 30 percent AMI in Amherst County, 365 are able to afford their current home, while another 410 cannot.

This represents a rental housing “gap” of more than 400 homes that must be created or made affordable to alleviate cost burden among those renters. Across the region, this gap is most severe for renters below 50 percent AMI. Very few renters between 50 and 80 percent AMI currently struggle to afford their home.

Caution

As of spring 2023, the latest available CHAS estimates published by HUD are based on the 2015-2019 American Community Survey 5-year estimates. Therefore, these estimates do not reflect changes that have occurred since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Across all four counties, the rental housing gap below 30 percent AMI is 2070 units, 913 units between 30 and 50 percent AMI, and 135 units between 50 and 80 percent AMI. The total rental housing gap is 3,118.

Figure 6.24: Rental housing gap by household income